


No Plan

by mulderitsdee



Series: Let the awful song be heard [2]
Category: Black Friday - Team StarKid, The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals - Team StarKid
Genre: Alternate Universe, Autistic Paul Matthews, Character Study, F/M, Post-Canon Fix-It, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, The Black and White (Black Friday), autistic paul
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-22
Updated: 2020-07-22
Packaged: 2021-03-04 19:33:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,966
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25451710
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mulderitsdee/pseuds/mulderitsdee
Summary: In another timeline they didn’t make it this far, he was infected and she died, they were split apart by alien meteors and eldritch gods and god knows what else.Paul and Emma in Colorado, a year after the events of The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals. Technically a follow up to There Will Be Darkness Again (and Again and Again) but can be read as a stand alone.
Relationships: Paul Matthews & Emma Perkins, Paul Matthews/Emma Perkins
Series: Let the awful song be heard [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1843453
Comments: 2
Kudos: 39





	No Plan

**Author's Note:**

> Well it took months because of who I am as a person, but here it is! Sorry for the wait.

Colorado, it turns out, is fucking freezing. Not all year round, but in the winter at least, Paul feels like he’s going to freeze his fingers off every time he walks out the door. Not that he goes out all that often when there’s snow on the ground. It’s been a little under a year since Hatchetfield, but getting used to a prosthetic leg is slow going and he doesn’t trust himself not to fall on his ass the moment he steps out onto some ice. Emma would probably find it funny and that thought alone is almost enough to make him consider it, she doesn’t smile enough. Not that he blames her, god no, after what they’ve both been through, well-it’s a wonder they’re still getting up each morning. 

Most mornings, anyway. 

Sometimes he can’t manage it, especially when he first moved in. He would lay in bed staring at the walls with nothing on his mind except guilt. Bill’s death would play over and over in his mind (a bullet from Deb, from his own hand, his guts torn out by McNamara, strangled in the mall, over and over and over and-) along with all the other people he failed to save in every single timeline. McNamara (not infected, not this time) told him not to dwell too hard on it, to focus on the fact that this time he and Emma had both made it out alive, but it’s a small comfort. Sometimes exhaustion would pin him to the bed after spending all night jerking awake with nightmares (memories? predictions?) of all the things that did go wrong, and could have gone wrong. One night he sees the same memory from his time in the Black and White-himself infected, his hands (but not his, not really) reaching out for Emma, killing her, the whole world becoming a fucking musical because of him, because he wasn’t strong enough or fast enough or-Emma found him throwing his guts up after that one, and the only releaf was that he wasn’t puking blue. 

Still, it’s getting better. He has less bad days and Emma is spending more time out in the fields instead of holding up in her (now theirs, he moved out of the spare room a few months ago) room screaming into the pillows. Colorado is a hell of a place to grow weed, he has to give PEIP that, barely a year and the crops are flourishing. Or so Emma tells him, anyway, he’s never had much of a green thumb himself. Most of the help he can offer is watering the things she points out to him, and carrying equipment the best he can with his unsteady legs. Some nights they curl up on the sofa together and split a joint, watching whatever dumb movie is playing and trying not to wince when music plays over the scenes. His therapist has suggested trying to ease music back into his life gradually, but it’s slow going. Emma is trying too, having been told the same (though they don’t talk about their therapy sessions often, maybe someday they will, but neither of them are ready yet) but the most they can manage at the moment is classical music in the background while they cook. Anything with lyrics is a no go. 

(Sometimes Paul will catch himself humming songs he doesn’t know but that feel oh so familiar. Sometimes while he’s cooking he will zone out only to realise ten minutes later he’s singing about the inevitable, and he has to go lock himself in the bathroom and count to and then back from five hundred while the dinner burns on the stove and Emma tries to gently talk him down through the door. Sometimes he jerks aware with a song on his lips and Emma looks so scared that he begs her to leave. She never does, but after nights like that he sleeps on the couch for a while.)

Christmas looms on the horizon and Paul turns it over in his mind wondering what the hell he’s going to buy Emma. It will be their first Christmas, though technically they were together last Christmas neither of them had been much up to celebrating it, having only escaped Hatchetfield two months prior. Emma had just moved to the farm, and Paul had been so deep into his own mind he could barely have told anyone what year it was, never mind the day.

(He doesn’t remember much from that time, mostly just fear and confusion and a voice whispering to him in the dark about dimensions and black and white and timelines. He remembers screaming himself horse on a hospital bed thinking that it was happening again, that the nurses were agents of Wiggly, and that the doctors were part of the Hivemind. Neither he nor Emma bring that stretch of time up, and he’s thankful to forget it.)

Maybe a holiday, he thinks, gazing out at the snow covered street, a cup of black coffee warming his hands. Both of them like Colorado well enough, but it would be nice to have a change of scenery, or at least he supposes Emma would think so. To be honest he’s never been one for travelling himself, had barely stepped foot out of Hatchetfield before all this, but Emma’s been gently pushing him to broaden his horizons more. Maybe he could buy them tickets to Guatemala and they could laugh as coatimundis stole the picnic they’d made together to eat half way through their hike. He has a passport in his bedside draw, or Ben Bridges does anyway, they could do it. Sipping his coffee he makes a mental note of the idea, files it away to be examined properly later. Gift shopping has never been his strong point, malls are too crowded and noisy and he can never be sure that people actually want the things he’s buying for them. At least this year Emma is the only person he really has to buy for, and he can do that online. 

(Shopping malls are a no-go right now. Last time he steppd foot in one was a few months after moving, and he’d ended up having a panic attack in the food court. It wasn’t just the crowd or the noise, it was the bone deep knowledge that something had happened in a place just like this, in some timelines. Emma bludgeoned to death over a tickle me wiggly, a comet trail across the sky, blood and blood and blood and-he hasn’t been back since)

“Morning Ben!” calls a voice from the road and Paul looks up, startled. He and Emma have made a token attempt to meet their neighbours, separated as they are by a few acres of land. Paul has never been one for socialising, but PEIP made it clear they had to at least introduce Ben and Kelly to the locals in order for their cover to stick. Most of their neighbours are nice enough, Mrs Helberg has them over for dinner sometimes because Paul doesn’t have it in him to say no and Emma likes the old woman’s surprisingly raunchy sense of humour. Sometimes Paul stutters around Emma’s name, almost forgetting to call her Kelly, or zones out halfway through a conversation, but Mrs Helberg is always patient with him, sometimes patting his one knee and telling him to take as much time as he needs. 

“Good morning Mrs Helberg,” he calls back, offering her a genuine smile reserved for a small handful of the locals he’s come to know. Behind her a huge black labrador lumbers along, sniffing curiously at every rock they pass. The old woman raises an arm in greeting before heading off towards her own farm, but the smile stays on Paul’s face. Maybe if an eighty one year old woman can walk around on the ice with no problem he’ll manage to figure it out one of these days. Though none of the neighbours have been quite so rude as to ask about his missing leg, Emma heard some of them gossiping in Walmart about how they thought he must have lost it to a landmine, and he’s happy enough to let them keep thinking that. It’d been PEIP’s idea to make Ben and Kelly war vets, though Emma had been particularly annoyed about it because it makes her sound like “a fuckin’ boot licker, gross.” Paul can’t really bring himself to mind one way or the other, and at the very least it means the surrounding houses and farms are hesitant about setting off fireworks, which he appreciates. 

Maybe a dog would be a good Christmas present for Emma, he could ask Mrs Helberg about it. Emma mentioned the other day she always wanted a pet growing up, and a dog could be good for both of them. Taking it on walks would get them off the farm, and he’d read once about them being trained to deal with panic attacks. Then again, he didn’t know if having a dog around this much weed would be dangerous or not-he’d have to ask a vet. 

“Hey,” speak of the devil. Emma walks round from the side of the house, dressed in only a t- shirt and jeans despite the weather. It’s a clear sign she’s been in the heated greenhouse where they grow crops during the winter, because apparently weed isn’t good with the cold-he wouldn’t know he’s not a botanist. 

(He’s not much of anything, these days. PEIP gave him enough money that he doesn’t have to worry about work yet, especially not with the income from the farm, but he misses the feeling useful. Mcnamara had offered him a job with PEIP, said he has a connection to the Black and White now and might be able to put it to good use. He thinks about it, sometimes, after he catches flashes of other times Hatchetfield fell.)

“Morning,” he smiles at her, eyes and voice soft with love for this strong, beautiful woman that somehow landed into his life. Don’t get him wrong, he would never say the apotheosis was worth it to meet Emma, but she’s the silver lining to a really shitty grey cloud. She comes up beside him and leans against his shoulder, warm and solid and alive. There are so many timelines where things have gone wrong between them, more than bare thinking about, and he revels in the joy of the life they are building for themselves out here. It’s not perfect yet, probably never will be, but it is theirs. 

“What’re you thinking so hard about?” her voice is lined with humour, her forehead getting the little crease between the eyebrows that only appears when she’s about to tease him for something and he grins. In another timeline they didn’t make it this far, he was infected and she died, they were split apart by alien meteors and eldritch gods and god knows what else. Paul does not want to think about those timelines, and so he doesn’t.

“Nothing, I just love you,” he says, because it’s true and because they’re finally at a point where they can say such things without expecting the world to collapse around him. Emma snorts and pushes his arm, gently enough that he doesn’t lose his balance, but hard enough for him to know what she means by it. 

“Nerd,” she says, and then “I love you too, dumbass,” because she does, and Paul knows she does. Why else would they have found each other in so many different ways? In every apocalypse that’s come to Hatchetfield, they were always together at the end.

Which is why when he leans down to kiss her against her smiling lips, it feels inevitable.


End file.
